The Evolution of Modern Cosmology Over Six Decades
“Cosmologists are often wrong but never in doubt,” Russian physicist Lev Landau once said. In the early days, astronomers began by observing and modeling stars…
“Cosmologists are often wrong but never in doubt,” Russian physicist Lev Landau once said. In the early days, astronomers began by observing and modeling stars…
An international team of astronomers led by the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) has made a surprising discovery about the birthplace of groups of…
In the 1980s, researchers began discovering extremely bright sources of X-rays in the outer portions of galaxies, away from the supermassive black holes that dominate…
A research team has published a new study led by Pat Roche, professor of astrophysics at The University of Oxford, and Chris Packham, associate professor…
Astronomers have used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to make the most precise measurements of the expansion rate of the universe since it was first calculated…
Some galaxies in the universe are as much as a thousand times more luminous than our Milky Way galaxy, with most of their light being…
In the real world, your past uniquely determines your future. If a physicist knows how the universe starts out, she can calculate its future for…
Astronomers have the “all-clear” for an exciting test of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, thanks to a new discovery about S0-2’s star status. Up until…
Thanks to lucky snapshots taken by an amateur astronomer in Argentina, scientists have obtained their first view of the initial burst of light from the…
Astronomers have discovered that our nearest big neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, is roughly the same size as the Milky Way. It had been thought that…
Beauty, grace, mystery — this magnificent spiral galaxy has all the qualities of a perfect galactic Valentine. Captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, the…
A new simulation of supermassive black holes–the behemoths at the centers of galaxies–uses a realistic scenario to predict the light signals emitted in the surrounding…
The biggest black holes in the Universe are growing faster than the rate of stars being formed in their galaxies, according to two new studies…
High-resolution observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) imaged a rotating dusty gas torus around an active supermassive black hole. The existence of such…
If they existed, axions – one of the candidates for particles of the mysterious dark matter – could interact with the matter forming our world,…
A hole at the heart of a stunning rose-like interstellar cloud has puzzled astronomers for decades. But new research, led by the University of Leeds,…
The galaxy Arp 220 is ultraluminous (defined as having more than about 300 times the luminosity of our own galaxy) and, at a distance of…
The universe is highly magnetic, with everything from stars to planets to galaxies producing their own magnetic fields. Astrophysicists have long puzzled over these surprisingly…